Reading r/btc just now about the addition of BCH to the payment options after Visa & Mastercard quit handling payments for Pornhub. That's when it hit me. I wondered how much space payments would take up on the blockchain. Of course I started with the BTC chain since the only thing about the 1 meg limit that is good is that the number 1 makes thing easy to calculate. I went looking for data on the number of subscribers but was unable to find it. I was able to find that there are 22 million registered users (probably more now as usage has shot up due to Covid-19). So lets do some calculations.
Starting with the maximum would mean all 22 million registered users did monthly subscriptions. Eyeballing the average number of BTC transactions per day at around 310k we get 22,000,000 / 310,000 for nearly 70.97 days. That means that if they all tried to subscribe with BTC less than 43% could in a month with no other transactions occurring.
Now that's a bit extreme but it makes a point. So now lets assume only 10% of those 22 million are paid subscribers. Again 10% for simple math. That would eat up around 1/4 of all the block space for a month on the BTC chain. Still a major impact on an already nearly maxed out system.
So what would this do to BCH? Well unless all subscriptions occur on the same day not much. We have plenty of space to handle even all 22 million subscribers in a month. So why do we need scaling now then? It's simple. What happens if 32 or even 16 companies like this decide to use BCH? We are maxed out too. We need to be prepared to handle what the future may hold. A day when Walmart or Amazon decide to use BCH as their primary currency.
Once something like this kicks the adoption can it's going to roll downhill. When it does it's going to snowball. We better be ready or we will end up flattened at the bottom of the hill.
All BCH needs to fulfill the real dream of Bitcoin is the ability to scale for massive world-wide adoption. Until we have that ability we can not even hope for massive adoption. I believe developing the ability to scale for massive worldwide adoption will lead to viral growth and dwarf current adoption efforts. For me, trying to develop the ability to scale for the people of the world is the fastest way to increase adoption. Both efforts are worthwhile of course.